June 3, 2012

Recovering from Google Panda penalties requires optimal website content. Rewarding high-quality content is supposedly a primary goal at Google HQ, and is stated as being at the core of both Panda & Penguin and sundry interim algorithm updates. In light of that, perhaps some clarification of the “content quality” concept is in order?

In the context of Google, a picture is NOT worth a thousand words! Moreover, words must be accessible, not embedded in images or Flash movies, JavaScript, slide shows etc.

In 15 years as an SEO consultant, if there’s one common denominator evident on websites, it’s that there is a profound reluctance to expend time, money, and creative energy on unique text content. Brevity is the watchword – economical use of words is encouraged by design, branding and marketing advisers!

* The branding gurus want you to use the textual equivalent of sound bites – bullet points and short sentences!

* The website designers want the entire content of the page to be above the fold – no scrolling!

* The marketing and advertising team want the warm fuzzies – in preference to explicit descriptions of what you sell or do!

Basically, if you can’t present your subject (products or services) in an intelligent and articulate manner, and accurately define precisely what the point of the page is, and what it contains, its inevitably going to be seen as substandard and confusing content.

If you “borrow” extensively from other people’s creative content, at best you are immediately second best. At worst, you are clearly guilty of:

* Copyright violation
* Theft of intellectual property
* Plagiarism

WHY would anyone expect Google to reward them for that???

What Defines Good Content?

* Written by an authority on the topic, in his/her own words, and conveying valuable information to site visitors.

* Defines a problem, proffers a solution and explains why you need it.

* Research has determined the audience’s needs, and the page is written for the specific viewer demographic.

* Tell them what you are going to tell them
* Tell them
* Tell them what you told them

Don’t be vague, don’t waffle on about trivial stuff. Focus more on what your visitors need from you, and on solving their problems. Focus less on why you are so smart, handsome and witty.

Content Volume

There was a time when Google thought you could summarize a topic in less than 250 words and look like an expert at the same time. Obviously, that’s a superficial perspective, and they’ve addressed that by upping the ante on quality by considering volume.

Therefore, a page with 750 words that is original and gives better coverage of the topic in question can expect more exposure to the golden light from Google… That makes perfectly coherent sense to me, but apparently not to the pin-heads in Branding or Marketing…

Sure, There Are Shortcuts

Basically, creating good content takes a lot of time and creative ability. Actually, it takes damned near as long as the time and effort that goes into designing ways to cheat the system! However, some people instinctively prefer short-term gains derived from:

* engaging in black hat SEO tactics such as content cloaking.

* giving Google one thing and visitors another.

* engaging in dodgy schemes to make their site appear better than it really is.

When it all goes belly up, it’s incumbent on them not to blame Google.
Google Panda & Penguin – Marks out of 10

Actually, I heartily agree with the goal of rewarding good content. When I’m searching for something, I want the most relevant and helpful page to appear at the top of the list.
Is There a Fatal Flaw in Google’s Logic?

The algorithms make automated, and arguably, objective judgments of content on the basis of defined and extensive criteria.

In many situations, some subjective judgment is essential and it makes sense that peer comments from external sources are incorporated into the relevancy ranking algorithm. The latest algorithms place far greater emphasis on external public online commentary from Social Media websites. That’s great, kind of…

But what about the 100’s of thousands of excellent online businesses that have been providing exemplary services to customers for decades but;

* they are not on the Social Media radar – they don’t understand it, can’t be bothered with it, etc.

* they are not computer literate, nor do they comprehend Google’s strategy and the need to evolve.

* their websites meet the needs of their current and potential clients.

* They’ve always had decent rankings in their particular niche.

* Their website routinely delivers a significant portion of their new business clients.

Suddenly, Google arbitrarily changes the rules on established websites…

* Their website drops from page 1 to page 6.
* Their traffic drops by 75%.
* Their enquiries dry up overnight.
* Their income is slashed.

To add insult to injury, competitors who’ve been copying their content and stealing their ideas are suddenly ranked higher than them! That’s the consequence for many good businesses across the globe in the aftermath of the past year’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) ranking formula adjustments at Google.

What is not factored in is that some website classes/niches/industries simply don’t fit the Social Media referrals mold well. In a Social context;

* you might readily choose to “like” a page on a travel destination/hotel/tour operator/fishing guide website…

* you are far less likely to “like” a plumber, electrician, lawyer, gynecologist, proctologist, hypnotist, etc.

Any external referencing mechanism that assigns a social media weighting to niches that are not well represented tends to tip the scales in strange directions.

Have Search Results Improved?

Frankly, I remain unconvinced that the results of Panda + Penguin have been a resounding success;

* More harm than good has been done to thousands of innocent businesses.

* The garbage content in many built-for-Adsense / scraper sites still dominates niches.

* Authentic local businesses are still dominated in local search by parasite sites – particularly in niches such as bed & breakfast, hotels, rental cars. The leech sites that suck out commissions from the businesses that provide the services continue to prosper.

From what I see on a daily basis, there is a hell of a lot of collateral damage, but many primary targets are still intact!
Do Heavyweight Sites get too much Clout?

Why should a skinny page on Travelfish, Tripadvisor, Infohub, Agoda, HotelsCombined, etc. out-rank a location-specific town / provincial website? That would seem counter to the revolution.

If you operate an accommodation business in a town, is it fair that the top “accommodation” rankings are dominated by the people who don’t operate accommodation facilities! Instead, the tech-savvy, big-dollar accommodation promotion sites get top billing, and you have to either pay them to appear on their site, and/or give them a booking commission.

For example, try a search for: “bed & breakfast New Orleans”

To me, the results reveal a clear and unequivocal inconsistency (if not a double standard) in Google’s avowed dislike of selling/purchasing links.

* Are those bed and breakfast advertising sites truly more valuable in search results than a list of actual providers of bed and breakfast services?

The same logic and questions apply across a wide range of niche markets, where the service provider’s website is arbitrarily devalued in favor of the parasitic sites that live off the efforts of those providers… Or did I miss something profound in there somewhere?

Geographical Speed Wobbles

I’m perplexed about the impact of Penguin on sites’ positioning in Google’s geographic-specific databases. I’ve noticed dot.com sites that seem to have been relocated for neither rhyme nor reason. It used to be that a dot.com site;

* was assigned to the Google dataset of the country in which it was hosted – which makes sense…

* was assigned to the Geographic Target set in Webmaster Tools

In the past couple of months I’ve seen sites lose their geographic identity without the owner having made any changes. A New Zealand client’s dot.com, hosted in the USA, is included in “Search: pages from New Zealand.” That’s plain wrong, and neither the designer nor the owner has it tagged as geographically targeting New Zealand.

A Real-World Example

Flexiscreens.com is an Australia business based in Tasmania, producing flexible insect screens from premium-grade materials and delivering them world-wide. They’ve been targeted by copycats, but have always enjoyed good rankings and resoundingly good client testimonials due to exemplary products and services. The past year has been a roller coaster ride. First they were rewarded by Google, and then they were punished…

It’s the same content, basically unchanged in that time and it’s inexplicable that such wild variations should occur in traffic.

There are some peculiar aspects:

* Nov 2011 – at the peak of visitor traffic, 54% of visits were from Australia!

* May 2012 – that dropped to 17% of visits from Australia!

The website is hosted in Melbourne Australia. The site appears in “Search: pages from Australia” so is clearly associated with the Australian dataset. The variation in Australian visitors is inexplicable – one would expect that particular statistic to be independent of traffic volumes.

Low Quality Content:

In looking at the site from a critical perspective, it appeared that the 89 glowing client references might well be the Achilles Heel. These were separate individual posts in the Testimonials category, with a widget that selected one at random and displayed it in the page sidebar.

However, bereft of unique Titles and Descriptions, lacking headings, and with only a couple of sentences and no images, they would certainly appear to be of low quality and minimal value!

By way of remedial action, these were inserted into a Testimonials Manager plugin, retaining a random Testimonial display in the sidebar, but with a single consolidated page instead of 89 individual posts. 301 Redirection was put in place on those posts to the new Testimonials page.

Doorway Pages:

In addition, there were a dozen of so Authorized Distributor pages, half of which contained nothing other than a State or Country variation, making them appear suspiciously like Doorway Pages!

These were all combined into a single distributors page, with an index hyperlinked to State & Country sections, and 301 Redirection applied.

Impact of Remedial Action on SERPs Results

There was a prompt response on the rankings for multiple keyword search phrases:

* flyscreen distributors – jumped up +19 places within a week to #5 on Google.com.au

* flyscreen distributors – jumped up +55 places within a week to #10 on Google.com

* fly screen distributors – jumped up +3 places within a week to #9

The consolidated page with its larger and unambiguous content definitely gained rapid traction in the SERPs! Unfortunately, since then those gains have been off-set by further losses across the board, but traffic volumes have remained steady over the last 3 months.

Website Content – The Conclusion

To succeed in generating new business via online marketing, Google’s goal of giving the best and most relevant content to searchers must become your goal!

To rank higher than your competitors, your website content must be demonstrably better than your competitors.

* Take a long hard look at every page on your website and ask yourself what its purpose is, and how well it meets that purpose.

* Take a long hard look at your competitors’ websites, and their competing pages and decide if they are doing a better job.

Try and figure out what your visitors are looking for by conducting some online research – Google’s keywords tool gives some great information in that regard. This beats the hell out of keyword brainstorming sessions around the office coffee table!

Assess what the most important searches are to your business, and which pages relate to those searches. Rewrite and expand each page to ensure it incorporates the targeted keyword phrase, and provides an answer/solution that is specific / relevant to the topic in question. Make sure the keyword phrase is prominent in a heading, the title and description.

There is an old Chinese proverb to the effect that one should “Buy expensive, and cry once only!” Translated into a website context:

* If you make the upfront investment in high quality website content, it’s a one-off cost.

* If you pay for quick and dirty results, expensive repairs will be necessary on a regular basis.

Ben Kemp, a search engine optimization consultant since 1997, is a specialist in website redesign, and a veteran of 25-plus years of experience in the IT industry.

12 Responses to “Website Content Meets the Penguin Gold Standard”

Hi Ben, An excellent and far-reaching article! There are so many flaws in Google’s algorithms but the single ‘constant’ – as you point out – is quality content. What you don’t mention once is the word ‘copywriting’. As an experienced SEO copywriter, I’ve future-proofed all Buzzwords’ clients’ content – geography and all other potential variables – by applying the simple and obvious process of writing amazing content. You may want to reference Buzzwords’ Sitepronews article shown beneath your own article entitled: ‘SEO and the fool’s gold fantasy’. Quality content does exactly what it says on the tin: namely, provide users with the rewarding online search experience they expect, and Google with the raw material that’s its life-blood and raison d’etre.

Thank you for the insight. My website has been drastically damaged by the last Google update. I have built a 300+ page on the whisky industry, packed with information and product photos all my own work, and have seen a 65% reduction in traffic a lot of my pages have been replaced from the No1 page on google and are now no where to be seen. it cannot be just about original content but a more so called social aspect, which is difficult for our operating age group to achieve, They just do not operate in the facebook world thinking that it is the hangout of teenagers and Child molesters.
The only websites that have gained in my industry are the parasite advertisers and those with big buck advertising adwords.

Being an old cynic is this a ploy to for us all to join adwords and buy our way to the top.

As far as I can see this has done a lot to damage original content and rewarded the big budget boys

Ben, I really appreciate your SEO expertise and insights…I totally agree with you.
Thank you for your consistent good advice, which I am following and implementing on all of my pages.
Regards,
Peter Brenner, Webmaster of
AnnieSuccess.ca

Dear Ben, your article has been sitting in my Mail box for a few days when I decided to actually read it. I really think that you are spot on with your piece, at last something that make me cheer up! You see, as a business that conceive websites for select clients, it can only be good news.

I am torn between trying to go “Web2” and all the gizmo’s (more like Javascripts on steroid to me), but what about usability? What about SEO and what about Quality?

Thanks to this piece of information a lot of us will indeed be better off. Quality and usability can only be done on a one time basis, that’s why Google’s also deciding that “your free websites” sponsored by large companies are not a good enough quality content.

So. all in all it’s not much to be done if you already have that in place, which I think I have, just need to tidy a few things around and we should be flying.

Hi Ben. I couldn’t agree more with the observations you make. I wish I had a dollar for every argument I have had with clients over content v images. I want content for SEO, they want pretty pictures and no matter how I try to explain the importance of content they just want a pretty looking website on Page 1 of serps.

I have also held the view for a long time that an adwords budget will see higher ranking in organic results as well and seen it proved by watching what happens when an adwords campaign is paused or stopped. Organic results do decline!

Google’s organic results are dominated by high spending adwords clients, as you say, earning their living off the back of businesses who end up having to pay to advertise on those sites to get exposure.

Is Google living up to its publicly stated objective of “delivering the best results in search”…no way. Google is driven by revenue and increasingly forcing website owners into paying, one way or another, to get the exposure they need if they want to gain customers via the web.

Mike: You are quite rght on the copy-writing suggestion. I guess I don’t think of, or refer to it as copywriting because I approach the issue from a different perspective. I tend to think of content from a holistic perspective, rather than the copy element only.

My role in editing client’s website content is usually to refine whats already there, and to organise and categorise it effectively. That also involves analysing the search aspect – how would a potential reader choose to search for content of this type.

The process includes refining the content to ensure the most appropriate keyword search phrrase/s are placed in all the right places.

Martin: You said “It cannot be just about original content but a more so called social aspect”

Actually, experience suggests quality is by far the most important element. The challenge is to carefully engeneer that content in such a way that Google et al are presented with precise and accurate descriptive elements.

Social Media is important, but its just one of 200 elements Google analyses…

The other very important factor is your incoming link portfolio, as Google has started to punish anything it senses is inappropriate.

Gilbert: you asked “What about SEO and what about Quality?.”

In the reputable SEO world, referred to as White Hat, SEO is totally about quality… Its about improving the perceived value in any given page by applying a series of enhancements to whats already there.

Actually, I consider myself as a “wordsmith” as much as anything! I seem to spend much of my time correcting spelling, grammatical and punctuatiuon errors!

Recent Google’s upgrading shaking simply shaken the SEO world. Everyone is looking for solution to cope with the rules and regulation Google imposed. Content is the only way that can help gain page rank and popularity in Google search. The website is very helpful for SEO specialist. It will help them to do SEO.

Great written post. It is for those sites whose intentions are for Over optimization means posting duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles or blogs on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations.

Hi Ben! What a fantastically detailed article. I’ve been hearing a lot about how the latest Panda changes have affected Google ranking, mostly sob stories, but this is the first article I’ve read that has been detailed enough to actually explain to me how the algorithm “thinks”. Thanks!